


The Ghost of a Falling Man: A Diary

by scuttlesworth



Category: Bone Key - Sarah Monette
Genre: Diary, Ghosts, Libraries, M/M, Research, Yuletide, Yuletide 2012, archives, cite your sources, the research was fun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:54:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scuttlesworth/pseuds/scuttlesworth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, there was a Museum. Inside the museum there was an archive, and inside the archive was a ghost...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost of a Falling Man: A Diary

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pitseleh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pitseleh/gifts).



> Beta by the incomparably kind tinypinkmouse, to whom I must give credit to for hunting the wild British "u", gently pointing out when I'd failed to fully unpack a scene, and filling in the potholes and plotholes.

***

_...How time wears on! what a thing it is to look back, still able to walk and see, God be thanked. I am told the sunlight is weak but it still seems blinding after so long in darkness, although there is no snow yet this year. The smell of dry grass, the woodsmoke; although there still seems a curious layer of … I do not wish to ever say those words again. I do not wish to think that way. I will not. From now on my life will be free of such things forevermore. Surely once in a lifetime is enough. I am hopeful that this will pass with time, as the clean air of the mountains will be all I will ever breathe again, and the ocean with all that it brought me of horror grows further behind me with every mile. The train..._

 

The book opens. The differences between this flight of exploratory dreaming through a diary and the harsh reality are sudden and cold on his immaterial form. Light from dim incandescent bulbs instead of sunlight flickering on a fast-moving train; air tainted with the pages of a hundred thousand pieces of paper, vellum, parchment, leather – not the air of a train smelling of coalsmoke and open prairie. He was dreaming of being someone else, a woman on a journey – and now he is himself.

 

In all the hundred or so years he has haunted these low levels, in all the time his world has been both constricted to a few layers of metal shelving and yet stretched beyond the seas to encompass every continent and all of the written past that the museum could collect, this has never happened before. Yellowed pages creaking, the former Junior Archivist Cavin Ezra Ichabod Morton is yanked will-he-or-nil-he from a most intimate contemplation of the life of Lady A. Barnard, and thrust into the hands of a stranger.

 

It was a safe place, a safe book, hidden away on a far dark shelf on the lowest level. A woman’s diary of recovery from the things that hounded her (although she dies in the end under terrible circumstances, he has enough experience living the lives of others vicariously that he is fully capable of leaving before he reaches that sad end). It is one of his favorite books in the stacks to hide in. And someone else is holding it, reading it. Holding him, in a sense, because he was the book; he was the hand that wrote with a dip-pen carved from a feather, spidery on the pages. He saw through her eyes what she saw when she wrote, remembered what she remembered as she set a part of herself down into the paper. The sense of violation at being plucked from his endless bussman’s holiday was profound, and it left him in a miserable mood. It was someone’s fault, then.

 

Someone tall and pale, with a long unlined face and white hair and long bony fingers. Pale eyes, clear eyes - he has a dark suit and a vulnerable expression, and Cavin is tempted to forgive him, but he’s turning the pages of Cavin’s favorite refuge with a curious expression which means he’s not about to put it down. “You see that our books are remarkably well preserved,” intones an older and smaller man beside the interloper. Another, fatter man stands smugly behind them. The tall young man humms agreement.

 

In a fit of pique, Cavin sends a puff of dust up from the pages to their noses, and flees along the stacks to the sound of violent sneezing. He’s down again and into another diary, this one not so beloved but it will have to suffice.

 

It won’t do to be around when the other one comes at the commotion. The living have certain defenses against that sort of thing (not enough, not nearly enough, and Cavin’s conscience is wringing its hands in the corner of his mind) but more than Cavin does, being dead. You could warn them, his conscience pleads in a small voice, but his desire to survive has been counting the seconds. Not now, it replies, and it always has the final word.

 

How funny, that his desire to survive is the strongest part of him now that he’s dead. It wasn’t when he was alive, which is how he got to be the way he is.

 

 

 

  _My wishes, expectations, and prayers, for a remarkable visitation from God, have not been so fully granted as I hoped for; I mean, on that last day of the former, and the first day of this year. But upon a very slight survey of the Lord’s dealings with me,  in the course of the preceding year, I may venture to say, the scale of mercy has almost continuously preponderated; and I may hope, I will also add, I trust I have not lost ground in the constant struggle against the darkness which surrounds me. His light is not the light I have expected, as it burns, but I am but a mortal woman and only constant gratitude is appropriate for the Lord who saves me from the lustful things which would bring me into darkness. Oh Lord of the sands, keep me safe from the things that dwell beneath the waters..._

  

Cavin is hungry.

 

It has been a while, he thinks, so he cautiously slips free of the story, first his focus and then his hearing and then his sense of smell, and finally his vision and what remains of his body. There is no sign of the other here and now. He drifts as though nothing more than an errant breeze (here, three stories underground, in stacks of books and paper which form great dusty walls? No breeze would dare).

 

At last, a small room separated from the rest of the Archive by a thick steel door. New Acquisitions, the sign says in elderly gold-flaked lettering. He drifts about the outside, first; sometimes things come in with new acquisitions, and sometimes those things are mobile. Once he found an entire stream of bookworms crawling their way towards his precious stacks. That had been lovely eating, but he’d been in a towering rage for nearly a year. The junior archivist in charge of inspecting acquisitions had quit six months after that, and good riddance. It’s a nice coincidence that his consumption of the little bugs gives him what he needs and preserves the papers, but no excuse for the Archivists to get sloppy with their jobs.

 

A stack of portfolios that have apparently been sitting near a corpse for a while; he finds rather a lot of beetles in there. They’re delightful. He fancies their tiny lives have more crunch. A few moths try and escape, and for a while he watches them against the dim yellow lightbulb. When he takes them gently into his mouth, the lightbulb flickers at his nearness and burns out. The room plunges into darkness.

 

Mr. Lucent comes back a few minutes later, followed by the tall dark-suited form of the pale-haired man.  Cavin is slipping away, but pauses. Mr. Lucent flicks the lightswitch nervously, up and down, and mutters in a worried voice at the lack of response. A name stands out; Mister Booth. The pale man blinks. Cavin retreats. He’d be sorry but it’s beyond his control, and Mr. Lucent is an idiot anyways.

 

The pale man is Mister Booth, then.

 

 

 

 

_16th - Sir W- L- met at Billesdon Coplow and killed a fox; the fox had what he called worms, and he drove the dogs away from it lest they catch them too. I have never seen worms like that in all my years hunting and I pray I never do again. One of the dogs disobeyed and snapped at the moving things on the fox, and caught one, and Sr W- shot it dead right there at our feet. He was sweating profusely and pale and would not meet my eye. I think he suspects things he will not say, as the fox came from Sir R- N-’s lands._

 

_After, he went away by Somerby, hard, and lost at Little Dalby._

 

The pale man - Booth - and a woman are there in the stacks. Cavin can hear them from where he rests, halfway between winter in 1881 Germany and autumn somewhere near Tuscon around 1900. He’s trying to decide which he’s in the mood for. They’re both exciting stories, dangerous to visit, full of things which can take notice of his presence. Stories that are terribly alive. Instead of the stories, he stops to watch the people. Living people are not so common, here, when you add up the sum total of an endless lifetime spend in these few floors of collected research. And he is always here. Lifetime, he thinks, distracted by an old internal argument. What a useless word. Although what should he replace it with, then? Afterlifetime? Undeathtime? Cavin has spend decades carefully contemplating the proper lexicography of his new existence, and has yet to come to any firm, scholastic conclusions he would feel comfortable having published. 

 

He watches them, their skin and hair and eyes and clothing. He drifts near and thinks he’s not the same person he was, when he was alive. Living he’d been studious, fascinated with the worlds of the past, with the people who’d lived and died. Now he was of the past himself, drifting among them as he chose. He was a thing descended from above into their worlds to bring them out of the dust and make them dance over and over again. It felt a bit sacrilegious, to see the shimmering thoughts that had been recorded in ink and sweat and touch on the dead pulp of trees or the dead skin of lambs. He did it anyways. It was that or go mad.

 

His sanity, Cavin knew, was quite open for debate; but with whom, truly, would he have such a debate? One required a community for these things, and the pages he inhabited did not respond to his enquiries. They merely played back recordings. He was no longer certain he knew how to interact with something that could change at whim, something that did not follow a preset path to a foregone, long-dead conclusion.

 

(There were books where the endings were less certain. Those were bound in leathers that were not kidskin or calf, on pages which were not woodpulp. They had always seemed something to be thoroughly avoided; some were more alive than he was, and perhaps dreamed their own tainted dreams. They whispered day and night.)

 

Now he is a daredevil sort. Now he dips into stories like a swallow skimming across a sale, a sip here, a week there. Diaries, tales, histories. He’s building a map of the world from beginning to the ever-moving now, a patchwork map filled with holes and lies and overlapping perspectives, bright spots and swathes of darkness. He knows more than he ever expected to have time to learn, in all his life; but the learning now isn’t like it was when he was alive.

 

Alive like these two. She’s a fierce creature, Cavin thinks, watching her. Glorious hair. In life she’d have been quite beyond his comprehension, but reading so many stories - she reminds him of Joan d’Arc, of Queen Elizabeth, of the nameless daughter of a long-dead archaeologist. She’d been dragged along by dear papa into the desert. He died studying the Egyptian gods, she was sent home but never made it there. He thought perhaps she was the same woman he found mention of, later on, as first concubine in the harem of a powerful and terribly hideous sultan. She had loved him, in her way. It was rumored that he took her word over any of his soothsayers or white-bearded advisors, and prospered greatly by it. 

 

Cavin can’t see this one in a harem, though. She’d be wearing a pith helmet and stomping her way through the jungle, he thinks, amused. But his eyes are drifting, over and over, to Booth. Bad, he thinks, ashamed. He’s always been bad. But what, then, is evil about it now? He’s dead and has lived so many pieces of other lives. Booth is human, and living, and surely it’s not a terrible sin to be drawn to such sweetness. It’s difficult to throw off the chains of his old life, but. There are no consequences....

 

Cavin can still taste the tiny sour life of an ant fallen from a researcher’s shoe, taken yesterday and savored for hours. Mister Booth does not wear a properly fitted jacket; his wrists protrude from his cuffs, pale bone under the skin. Cavin thinks of touching him there, where his pulse lives, to see if he can feel the flow.

 

And then the idle moment is over, because something has turned its gaze upon them. Cavin can feel it from above, where it looms somewhere that isn’t here. Can feel it coming. They don’t notice, aren’t scared. They need to be scared. The glorious woman and the shy researcher need to go, need to be elsewhere, he needs to -

 

Cavin flies blindly up, past the grating and boxes, and stops. He’d be heaving and out of breath if he still had a body. He’s higher than he usually dares to go - it’s dangerous, this high, he can feel the ceiling and the other just above him, descending. Descending to him, to the bright sparks of the two below.

 

Cavin slams himself down on the grating by the stairs.

 

It is like crashing at full speed into ice. And it bongs, faintly, like a footstep.

 

Again, down. Again, down. Again. Again. Again. They run, he can hear them running but he doesn’t stop.

 

He is falling, there are hot hands on his shoulderblades, he’s halfway down to the bottom of the stairs and he feels himself knocked loose from his body. He can see it, a suited thing tumbling like a doll the rest of the way down, all limp-boned and bloody-haired as it falls, rags and sticks and empty, empty, because he’s not in it. He doesn’t want to be in it, it’s broken and it will hurt but he tries because it is cold cold cold out here without it, he wants the warmth, he wants his beating heart so fiercely. So he scrambles down the stairs and tries, shuddering with cold and disgust, to crawl back inside. There’s just a bit of warmth left in it. But it doesn’t work, he presses his hands into it and can feel the cells dying like sunsets and burnt-out stars.

 

He looks up and there by candlelight, the senior, his mentor, the Archivist who taught him the paths of this institution. The man he trusted is staring down blank-faced at what he’s done and that man owes, owes heat and light and warmth, and Cavin is flying up and pressing against him, pushing, sucking the warmth; and there’s a shock like lightning and the man shudders, the candle flickers. The living man turns grey and stumbles back, runs away. The dead man stays.

 

Cavin Ezra Ichabod Morton is dead. He is not, however, gone. That bit of stolen life lives inside him, bright and burning. He carries on.

 

The murderer comes back only once in all the years. Wise man, to be so wary. He walks beside another fellow, new and tall and strong, with gleaming boots and an arrogant moustache. Cavin’s murderer is older and stooped, and glances about with watery eyes. Cavin drifts beside him. The man shudders, brittle bones chilled, while the younger man boastfully lectures on how there’s nothing to fear from a bunch of dusty old books. Cavin laughs, softly, beside his murderer’s ear.

 

Cavin takes a portion of the old man’s life before they go. The elderly man sways and clutches his hands to his jacket. Cavin still feels young and strong, after all this time; his body has never been subjected to corruption. The bent old man sways, and the mustachioed man takes his arm and guides him away, back out into the world.

 

Much much later, they bring down the director’s yearly report book, and Cavin dips in with wry interest. One entry in particular catches his attention; he can see in the ink the discovery of the body. The old man died at his desk the same evening he visited the stacks. Cavin watches the doctor come and go, and the final consensus is that his heart gave out.

 

Cavin sometimes wonders if up there, among the polished wood and beeswax and dust, an elderly ghost wanders about the offices, remembering the feel of cold lips on the nape of his neck. 

 

 

 

  _Sunday, 25th - I stayed over night at Spark’s and attended meeting at the grove again this morning. We had a basket dinner at noon. At the afternoon service the Lord’s Supper was observed. After the meeting we started for home, a distance of eleven miles._

 

_Monday, 26th - There was a heavy rainstorm last night. I worked all day, picking onion seed, and in evening went down to Inland to make arrangements to go back to Davenport in the morning to join the camp._

 

_Tuesday, 27th - I got nearly to Davenport today by the river boat, but there was a log in the river that the pilot did not see in the churned-up mud. He said there must have been heavy rains up north in the catchment for the river. We are stuck, and not all the lightening of load we can manage, nor all the men out on the sandbar up to their knees in dark muddy water with poles can lift us free. The log is wedged deep into the side of the boat. We must wait for another boat to come by._

 

_Wednesday, 28th - it has been a long dark night. The boat made unholy noises against the log all night as the currents changed and picked up. The boilers failed, water got in where it shouldn’t and cracked a hot pipe, I’m told. A man was scalded and he screamed all night as well. One man ran about crying that his wife had gone missing and we must find her; he swore she did not go overboard when we struck the log, but said he spoke to her; but no-one can recall seeing her for a day. The water swirls around the boat and rises and we are wedged tight, and tip alarmingly; I stood by the railing with some other men. A man said there were things living in that water, and another said he’s lived by the river his whole life and that was nonsense. Another cast his hat into the water to watch it drift; I think he meant to prove the second man correct. I thought him mad to waste a good hat. His hat floated for a moment, tossed on the little waves, then vanished under the brown in a roil. We were all silent after that._

_I am grateful for this morning light._

 

The water is so cold. So cold, so cold, and there are things in it. They are nibbling on him, on his ankle, he is drawn under, down, down under...

 

The book opens and he is ripped free from the tides and the things that squirm in the mud under the logs and rotting eyes that look at him, look so hungrily, and there are other eyes. Other fingers, long and pale but warm. So warm.

 

How does the tall pale man find him, every time? He shudders beside the stack of boxes as Booth’s hand cradles the book which Cavin so recently occupied; the man has an introspective look on his face, and the fingers of his other hand drift over the spines of the other books in the box. He is ignoring the one he holds open. His gaze follows, a moment behind Cavin’s silent flight away. In the silence he may or may not hear a soft voice - there only in the rushing of blood in his ears - whisper _thank you_. 

 

 

 

_July 20th -_

_Nearly a month since I left you old Journal. Well, here am I again to record, my unimportant doings in the midst of all important happenings. Pa has been appointed Consul to Glasgow - Scotland! and there is not much doubt of his appointment being confirmed. When we reached Washington we went at once to the National Hotel, where most of the Kentucky delegation stop - as well as a good many other distinguished Senators and Congressmen and also Vice President [Hannibal] Hamlin. The first evening we were there what a brilliant set of men were assembled in one of the parlors! Senator Crittenden, Attorney General Joseph Holt, Col. Henry Grider and Robert Mallory, Congressman; Emerson Etheridge of Tenn., Clerk of the House of Representatives; Generals Lovell H Rouseau and Green Clay Smith; (the last has the prettiest eyes I ever saw) and by no means least in brilliancy, my own dear father. Mr. Mallory had that day had an interview with Stanton, Secretary of War - who had not treated him with the courtesy he had reason to expect from any gentleman. Mr. Mallory was so angry and his account of the interview so very funny that the others roared with laughter though Mr. Mallory, in his righteous indignation, failed to see any occasion for laughter which made it all the funnier to the others._

_All was not so bright, though, throughout the evening. Miss Bell and I were invited to the parlour to spend the evening with Mrs. Wadsworth, and as we were making our way there we encountered the Ambassador from Zalambalad, Mr. Wazir Isfaq, in the doorway beside a large plant. I do not know why he was there. Not at the doorway but at the party at all, not to be rude, but his country is a small one and not as interested in our doings as perhaps Great Britain or France might be, or even Canada or Mexico. Although their Ambassadors were also present, it seemed strange to include someone from such a remote country. Pa said after that he seemed interested in trade, but I do not believe it. For his conversation with us - lecture, truly, for we said nothing in response, being so taken aback at the ambush! - was entirely in his native tongue, and his eyes were most anxious. He spoke - “Baraka, aaadeem jill wahid ghalaba”, he said, and I am miswriting this miserably for I know nothing of his language, but he repeated it so many times I could not help but remember some of the words. Pa said he spoke perfect English at other times, so I do not know why he spoke his own language to us two, who could not understand it. Miss Bell was the main focus of his intensity and was most overcome, and a goodly portion of the rest of the evening was spent restoring her to good spirits. She said, when Mrs. Wadsworth was gone for a bit and in tones of confidence, that she almost felt she knew what he was saying, and that the poor man was terrified of something which was coming. She felt an overwhelming threat, she said, a doom. I told her it was not precisely nonsense, but a thing we all felt, because of the political situation. And though she seemed doubtful, she nodded, and grew less pale. The next morning she and I went up to the Capitol with Mr. Etheridge - whilst Pa was attending to his own affairs. The rooms of the “Clerk of the House” at the Capitol were most elegant..._

 

He has been women and men and children and the elderly. He has crossed deserts and climbed mountains, wept and laughed, danced in ballrooms with great men and taken supper with monsters. He has died and lived and lusted and survived for what he estimates must be a hundred and twenty seven years now, give or take the fact that there are neither stars nor seasons, and he is no longer certain of his birthdate, after such a number of other lives.

 

He knows he was once named Cavin. (He does know this. It is not a fiction. Who else could he be? He remembers his death, at least, in among the deaths fo so many others.) He knows this is not his time, not his place; this modern era, in which women work and electric lights are strung through his haunting spot.

 

For all that he was not born here he has made this time his own. By living the lives of those memories brought in on paper, the ink-whorled imprints of a thousand, thousand lives here collected, he has brought himself forward as though days and nights truly passed for him. So he has not stayed still, but has seen what was future to his living self.

 

More than the future, he has gone back as well. Back in time through the vast preponderance of the papers available; for a hundred years and some have passed since his death, but a thousand and more are still there before he was born to explore. The past often seems more real than the present. Still, it is the present every moment, to the writers of these records; and Cavin has found that men of the past are as like unto men of today as brothers. For all that every present sees the past as an uncharted land of barbarism, it is not so. Not truly so – every age seems to have its own share of darkness, though. He does not deny it. He has tasted more than a share of smoke and sick fear, and lived through books that should never have been opened.

 

He has done nothing that quite so terrified him as this.

 

The book opens. He steps from behind the stack, and the pale man whose shoulders are hunched in as though to apologize for his height (always apologizing, Cavin thinks wistfully, he’s like that) looks up and his pale eyes widen.

 

“Hello,” Cavin says, and the man blinks and twitches, and Cavin smiles at him.

 

The man opens and closes his mouth. Like a fish, Cavin’s mind supplies. Cavin waits.

 

“Hello,” the man says, and stalls there.

 

“It is very nice to meet you properly at last. My name is Cavin Morton,” Cavin supplies when the silence goes on a bit too long. 

 

“I know,” the man says, blinking rapidly. “Um. I mean. Very sorry. But I know who you are. It was only logical.”

 

“Ah,” says Cavin. “The perils of introductions to a researcher. They go both ways, you know; I know who you are as well. You’re Booth.”

 

The pale man is taken aback. Cavin’s lips twist. “Ghost, you see? Invisible doesn’t mean I can’t still see what goes on here.” Booth twitches, guiltily, and Cavin laughs. He hasn’t laughed in - so many years, not as himself. It feels rusty. He’s been other people for so long; who, then, is he when he is not them? Booth joins in the laughter, shamefaced, a faint blush on his cheekbones, and if Cavin had lungs his breath would catch.

 

Instead, he tilts his head. “Fancy a stroll?”

 

There isn’t room to walk side by side in most of the archives. Cavin leads; he knows this place best. They walk, one silent and the other nearly so for all his awkward long limbs. Here, then, an unremarkable spot on the lowest level, where two aisles meet and there’s a slightly clearer space. Cavin stands, and Booth joins him.

 

“My name is Kyle. Um. My first name,” says Booth, and Cavin tastes it. Kyle. He nods, then looks up, and after a moment Booth does too.

 

There are six stories in the archive. All six floors are made from solid, if noisy, metal grating. This allows airflow, which prevents damp from taking hold, but also - as every researcher knows to their dismay - allows dust and debris to fall down on your head from above. It means the lowest levels of the stacks are coated in a layer of fine particles - paper, leather, fabric, sand - everything. It also means that in this one spot you can look up through the grating and, by a trick of the light and the way the gratings are aligned, you can see all six levels.

 

The stacks rise up and up. Light filters down from the electric lights on the highest level, dust motes dancing through every inch. The effect is something like being at the bottom of a well and looking up through tangled roots at a dim and distant sun; it is terribly beautiful, in a sad and lonely way. Not everyone would appreciate it.

 

Kyle Booth stands for a long moment, looking up.  When he looks down his eyes hold something thoughtful.

 

“Oh,” he says, an exhalation.

 

 

 

_Monday February 15 1864_

_In camp all day. Capt. L. Kurghoff bussted my Henry Rifle to day trying to shoot a beef but made no reparation for it. We moved 200 yards and camped. rain fell upon us today a hard as it ever falls we had no shelter. clear at night again the stars were out_

 

“Truly, you have not read this? It’s a glorious work! She begins quite young, and you can follow all the way through to her death - which was peaceful. Excellent source for Parisian society from mid 1521 through 1598 from the perspective of an educated maid, quite a catch. I’m surprised - Benedict mentions her in his notes. Then again, perhaps the French have fallen out of fashion?” Cavin’s expression is impish. It has the intended effect; Kyle laughs. His laugh is as rusty as Cavin’s was.

 

 

 

_12th. My dear mother, together with brother and sister Hulton, came to see us. Stayed all night. Next day returned. I was much pleased, and refreshed with their company; but, alas! How do such pleasures pass away - perish in the using!_

 

“Ah? You haven’t read Kirks? You aren’t just humoring me, are you?” His pleasure is layered with a cotton shroud of self-doubt; Cavin responds with fondness.

 

“Hardly. It does take me some time to go through a book; my reading isn’t quite like yours. Granted, I’ve had plenty of time, but - I still haven’t managed every single work in this mausoleum.”

 

“It’s amazing, that you can experience such things. What I wouldn’t give!”

 

“Not your life. Never that,” Cavin says, his voice intense, and Kyle draws back, alarmed.

 

“N - n - no, that wasn’t... I only meant...”  

 

They are silent, for a time.

 

Kyle’s voice is so soft it might not exist. “But you’re alone. Here. I don’t like to think that this is how… it seems wrong, that you should be so, when I’m not here. There should be… perhaps if we… ”

 

Cavin thinks that this wish of Booth’s to do a kindness for him will break his unbeating heart. If he were human there would be a lump in his throat. HE is not, though, and his words are as even as ever. Perhaps the process of speaking is too mechanical, now, that he no longer has blood and breath to carry his meaning. Perhaps his disconnection from the world is too far to overcome. He says nothing of this. “I’m never alone, Kyle,” he replies instead, and wishes he dared so much as brush his fingers over the hand that rests so close to his on the shelf. Instead he trails his fingers across the spines before him and smiles. “I am surrounded by multitudes.”

 

Kyle does not seem reassured.

 

 

 

_June 20th_

_Writ to Cousin Stoeke, answering his of the 10th inst. Last Sabbath day night dreamed of the death of my dear Wife, which made me very heavy._

_Went to hear Mr. Alsop, where, in utter part I saw Madam Horsman, who spake very kindly to me. About 10, mane, I visited Mr. Nathan Mather, who lives now in Fan-Church street. Betty Ward and her husband visit us June 24. Eat and drink at the 3 Tuns. Mr. Burfort visits us._

 

They are standing under a light, talking of the development of fabric dyes in China and the place of alchemists in this endeavor. Kyle is laughing, his body loose and relaxed, leaning on the shelving; Cavin is waving his arms about, animated, excited.

 

The lights go out.

I have been unforgivably stupid, Cavin thinks, rendered immobile with panic for a long moment.

 

Kyle’s breath has frozen in his lungs. In the darkness, without true eyes, Cavin can see the expression on Kyle’s face. It is one of terror.

 

“Do you trust me, Mister Booth?” Cavin’s voice is soft.

 

“Yes,” Kyle replies, without hesitation or stammer. Cavin has a moment to feel his heart twist at such a declaration. Then he kisses Kyle on the lips. Kyle’s warm, living, blood-blushed lips chill as cold as a midwinter grave. The air he sucks in through his nostrils freezes, and the skin inside his nose cracks and bleeds. Kyle Booth moans, and Cavin thinks, if I were alive perhaps that would not be a moan of pain. Cavin pulls back. He can see Kyle now not through darkness, but in a cold and glowing light.

 

I am like unto a firefly, he thinks in wonder.

 

Kyle’s life is only the second he’s ever tasted, and it burns in him like naphtha, like Greek fire, like the sun he has not seen for a hundred years and never will see again. It is exactly alike and so very different from the life he stole in revenge, so long ago. 

 

“I think perhaps I love you,” he says gently. Then he reaches into his chest and pulls out something - a piece of heart or some other vital thing - and throws it. It glitters in the darkness and flies off, a trail of pale dust lighting the stairs. He turns away. That exit is not for him. “Follow that, it should light your way out,” he calls over his shoulder, and shoots up and up and up, through the layers of metal grating and paper, to meet the thing that is coming down towards him, towards Kyle whom he loves. All the way up he can feel it burning inside him. Kyle’s lips, his gift. 

 

He sees the other thing coming, as dark as he is bright, and he does not look back as he darts past it, slipping beside its bulk where it fills the space (it takes up no space at all). It turns to chase him and he thinks, yes, follow me. Follow after me. Don’t look back, don’t look down. Look at where I’m going, I shine, I shine so brightly. All my lives. All my lives all at once.

 

He goes past it, and feels it all along his soul, there in the doorway. A doorway at the top of the Archives, but not a door - a crack, a gate, an opening, a burrow. A thinness in the universe, worn away, pressed open. On one side is the world, and on the other - well. He’s about to find out, isn’t he. 

 

As the darkness closes around him there is perhaps the sound of the Archive door clanging shut, and he hopes that his flight has been enough. But there is a cold practical part of himself that knows that the Archive door is not the door that is the problem, and these particular Archives will never truly be safe, and that he - for all he has a stolen spark of soul - is not enough to close the sort of gates that are open here.

 

It is one instant to cross the threshold, and he knows then that he has traveled further in that one step than a hundred ships circumnavigating the globe. Everything is gone. He does not believe it is darkness, not truly; merely that nothing so simple as light exists here, and so sight is meaningless. But it feels dark, and cold. And he must not forget that there is a thing behind him.

 

A thing around him, rather. Perhaps the gate was not a gate but a mouth; and he has been swallowed whole.

 

Too many of the wrong sorts of stories all in one place, he thinks. His mind is panicked and disjointed. He knew how to move in the world; here, he does not know if he moves, or does not. Things, cold things, are taking him apart at the edges and nibbling away at his limbs. It is slow, though, and only a little painful, the way very cold things are; he has time to regret. It would have been good had electricity not come, had there been a candle to knock over; to close this gate would take a fire which would consume everything in the Archives. He wishes he could have started one. Made it safe.

 

 

 

_April 22, 1787 - I Was calld to Mr Welmans at 9 this morn. His wife delivd at 7 Evn of a son... it is kindst to say the babe was born dead. We took it to the river and drown’d it, tho I said I doubt it could be drownd with how it looked. He did not argue me that but said the sack and rock would do the work. When I said he should see to whom his wife had as callers tho he struck my face and knocked me into the mud and I was obliged to lie to Mrs Welmans upon return and say I slipped. it rained this Evinng._

 

_Ipswitch Prison, March the 20th, 1812._

_Confined in a dismal and awful Prison and sometimes so absent in mind as not to recollect the circumstances which have occurred to me since I left my home, I have thought proper to commit to paper while in my rational moments the most extraordinary circumstances which have happened since my Imprisonment, as correctly as I can remember them wishing, should I lose my reason that this paper may be carefully preserved & sent to my family. _

 

_Tuesday, November 30, 1830_

_Aunt Lucy hurried ‘round today - we were so newly returned from school she must have noticed the very moment when Cassie and Asa reached the house and then set out for ours! It was not me she wished to see, nor Matty for that matter. But here she came, all bundled up, and asking Father as he’d harness to mend - or so she’d heard from Mr. Shipman - would he, and so forth, be so kind as to repair the leather strap which she now put forward? It had somehow rent apart, and came from one of her trunks. It seemed wide for a trunk-strap and stained and smelled awful, but Father took it in hand and double-stitched it up as good as new, and told her to be more careful, for she held her arm tenderly. She smiled over-brightly and said she would, and left. Matty asked if we should not have offered her cyder, and father shook his head and said no, she had matters to attend to. I asked what he meant and he tugged my braid and said not to worry about it but do my sums._

 

_Twenty two - hah - and not better educated, better informed of the ways of mankind than if he had inhabited some lonely cottage on the Green Mountain - What! I keep a journal of such a life as I live! without anything of an enterprising nature to record - must I bear witness against myself - of my folly - ignorance and sloth - Yes, perhaps by keeping these things in remembrance, I shall learn to shun some snares that, without this admonition, I might heedlessly fall into. Strict discipline is the key to understanding; each day must be recorded, each step written down._

 

_Friday, January 12th - In this new year, a new beginning! I have received word from the Museum that I am to be taken on as a Junior Archivist. It is a good bit of news, as my savings from the job at the newspaper have just about run their course, and there is little call for my specialty in the world outside academia. It is what I have dreamt of, truly, to continue learning my whole life long. It must seem dull to some. I know the fellows who wished nothing but an archaeological dig or a trip to the distant shores of Africa, to study the societies there untouched by White culture, might think me feeble; and perhaps I am. I have no love of danger, and have found, when confronting a near-miss with a fast carriage on the street outside the pub, that adrenaline makes me sick. I love the discourse here of learned minds, and the smell of old papers, and imposing a structure onto the disordered papers long neglected. I wish only to preserve what has been found, for it seems a great waste to me, that all our knowledge fades so. To my mind - the burning of the Library at Alexandria seems the greatest tragedy in all of history._

 

 

 

***    _FIN_    ***

   


**Author's Note:**

> Sources: 
> 
> The Cape Diaries of Lady Anne Barnard, 1799-1800  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=7z4DeizghM8C&pg
> 
> The life of Darcy, Lady Maxwell of Pollock, late of Edinburgh by the Rev. ---, with an abridgment of the extracts from her diary and selections from her correspondence by J.Gilchrist Wilson  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=ktcFeaPZDjEC&pg
> 
> A diary of the Quorndon Hunt: from the year 1791 to 1800, inclusive, in which will be given a succinct detail of every days̓ sport, the covers broke, the track pursued, and the final of each run, by Thomas Jones  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=s6tm5ZeA8RIC&pg
> 
> Downing’s Civil War Diary  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=OnEp0wXCnaYC&pg
> 
> Josie Underwood’s Civil War Diary  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=w24n2RD1FE8C&pg
> 
> A Civil War Diary: Written by Dr. James A. Black, First Assistant Surgeon, 49th Illinois Infantry  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=me6D4_TvwKEC&pg
> 
> Memoirs of the live & character of Mrs. Sarah Savage  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=zN2w4RpFt8oC&pg
> 
> Samuel Sewall’s Diary  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=yKt4AAAAMAAJ&q
> 
> A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=m17DJG3FHYMC&pg
> 
> A New England Prison Diary: Slander, Religion, and Markets in Early America, by Martin J. Hershock  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=fDpFfKfQbkUC&pg
> 
> A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl’s Journal, 1830-1832, by Joan W. Blos  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=g2eK_TAAECgC&pg
> 
> A Tale of New England: The Diaries of Hiram Harwood, Vermond Farmer, 1810 – 1837  
> http://books.google.com/books?id=qL19fe2mTigC&pg


End file.
